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May 30, 2005

I spent most of my first week of school on the teacher’s lap, which felt not unlike a feather bed tightly wrapped in wash and wear polyester. When I finally ventured out onto the playground, I quickly learned that people my own age did not necessarily share my interests. While I wanted to talk about the atrocities of Vietnam, the superiority of European cinema and the functionality of design that was deeply inherent in the creations of Charles & Ray Eames, my fellow six year olds were mostly interested in seeing whether Country Time Lemonade or Skittles held the throne of producing enough phlegm to hawk the worlds biggest loogie.

It seemed that I was wearing a shirt that read “please feel free to poke me with the nearest sharp stick”. I was not much for sports or roughhousing, but could definitely see the merits of puffy stickers and glitter, so after playing with the boys for about twenty minutes, I moved on to girls.

I haven’t looked back since.

In between having my hair brushed and playing tea party, I would stand and stare lovingly at the cotton panties of the budding female gymnasts hanging upside down on the monkey bars. After my daily lesson in female anatomy, I would walk to the fence that barred me from the freedom of the outside world.

On the other side of it was, of course, my mother.

She had set up camp with a carpetbag containing a seemingly endless supply of cigarettes, enough fashion magazines to fill the pyramids of Giza, a gallon thermos of black coffee and a family sized box of Ritz crackers.

I reached my tiny fingers through the chain links and she met them with her perfectly manicured hands.

“Your father and I are doing everything we can to get you out of there”

Prison’s a bitch when you’re twelve years shy of your eighteenth birthday.

After a week or so of my mothers sit in, the teachers began to complain.

“Mrs. Freberg, you can’t just sit out there day after day, it’s beginning to disturb the other children”

“I’ll leave when I’m damn good and ready”

The principal was called in.

“Donavan will be fine, Mrs. Freberg. You have my word. If he should need you, we will call you immediately”

“Alright. I’ll leave, but if for any reason he wants to come home…”

“Don’t worry, yes, of course…”

“May I have a moment to say goodbye to my son?”

My eyes welled with tears.

My mother thought for a moment, then she smiled her one hundred watt smile right into the pitch-black corners of my heart.

“I’ll be back before you know it”

I assumed that she meant the end of the school day.

A half hour later, the yellow taxi rolled up.

My teachers met her at the gate.

“I thought we discussed this!”

“Yes, yes, don’t worry, I’m not staying. I got home and realized that he had forgotten his lunch”

This made sense to the teacher, but not to me. My tuna fish sandwich and apple juice were in my bag, still cold. Something clandestine was afoot.

“Please give this to my son”, said my mother.

The teacher nodded approvingly and my mother waved at me and yelled in a loud voice, “I’m going HOME now honey, see you LATER dear”

My teacher handed me my lunch box.

It felt unusually heavy.

As soon as I was free of prying adult eyes, I opened it.

Dearheart,

The bastards haven’t had the last word. Enclosed you will find a police whistle and a pair of binoculars. Point them towards Lexington Avenue. If you need me, blow that whistle. It can be heard for up to one mile. I will come immediately and wait in front with the motor running. Run for it, jump in and we’ll be gone before anyone notices.

Stay strong and question everything.

Love,

Mother Bear

I put the spyglasses to my eyes and focused them on the parking lot down the block. Enshrouded in a blanket of eucalyptus trees was the cab that had been in front of the school for the last 72 hours. My mother was standing in front of it blowing me a kiss. I put the whistle around my turtleneck and waved back. She gave me the thumbs up and got back in the cab.

“What are you doing?” asked the teacher behind me.

“Birdwatching!” I said, innocently.

“And what kind of birds were you watching?”, she asked.

“Sparrows and Blue Jays mostly, though I’m on the lookout for native tanagers and wintering warblers!”

May 18, 2005

I bought it at Saks Fifth Avenue. Or I should say, my mother bought it for me. I was to be starting school, and having skipped pre-school and kindergarten, she figured that I should arrive in style. With the help of the cute salesgirl, we picked out a classic white leather clutch with a removable gold strap. “What a pretty daughter you have”, said the girl handing my mother back her Amex card. “Thank You!” responded my mom with a wink aimed at me. I slung my new purse over my shoulder and we took the escalator up to the boys department where my mother bought me a new pair of corduroys and a couple of turtlenecks. Our tummies were grumbling so we scurried off to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a little blood sugar raising. After our BLT’s and Cokes over chipped ice, we set out to our final destination.

The hair salon.

My mother was plagued by a list of phobias that would baffle the world’s best psychoanalysts, one of which was a mortal fear of haircuts. She was barber to both my father and me, but on this day she left my white goldilocks in the hands of Jose Eber, stylist to the stars. The moment I saw him, I knew why she had chosen him and not Christophe or Umberto or Vidal or some other such wizard of the scissors. Jose’s hair was down to his ass. He wore a white cowboy hat and black leather pants as tight as a Vienna sausage casing. He had a lit pink cigarette that hung from his mouth like a lollipop and bounced up and down like a pogo stick as he went to work on my new doo. As he clipped and shaped and mussed and fussed, my mother stood right behind him, saying over and over, “Not too short!” When he had finished, it looked like I hadn’t had a haircut at all. My mother approved. I got a red gumball and mom forked over three crisp fifties. “Keep the change!” Jose kissed her on the lips and mother and son went home in the big yellow taxi that had been our limo of the day.

Next to crew cuts, dogs over five pounds and chunky peanut butter, my mother most feared driving. She took taxis everywhere and on the rare occasions that she would let my father drive her, she sat in the back so that she would be “further away from accident”.

Even if they were the only two in the car.

“I’m not getting in the death seat”, she would say, climbing into the rear and buckling up for impact. Then she would force my father to avoid left turns, gas stations and all major freeways. Ditto for buses, alleys, garbage trucks, bikes and motorcycles. Unless we were driving through a bad neighborhood, she would always say, “Keep the doors UN-locked! It’ll be easier for the rescue crews to pull us out when the car catches on fire”

My mother was a professional pre-supposer, always expecting the worst possible case scenario in any given situation. True, my mother could turn every head in the room with her graceful elegance, but she could also turn calm to crisis faster than a tornado could spin a windmill.

But I digress.

Back to my hair.

When we got home, we put on a fashion show for my father. With my new handbag and virtually unnoticeable haircut and forest green cords with plenty of pockets for my Asper-Gum, I was ready for the biggest step yet in my life.

Grammar school.

“We don’t want you to go, but the government is forcing us. They’ll throw us in jail and hand you over to the truant officer if we don’t send you. Then you’ll have to live in Juvee Hall”, said my dad ominously.

Call me crazy, but this didn’t sound too good.

And I was right.

The next morning, I awoke at the crack of dawn.

10AM.

My father said, “For God’s sake, look at the time!”

“It’s OK, lets not rush him”, said my mother. “This is going to be hard on him, we should ease him into it”.

“But his first period started over an hour ago”, said my father, looking nervously at his Rolex.

“Actually, his first period started two weeks ago. Besides, they’re lucky he’s coming at all, the bastards”.

“I’ll get the car started”, said my dad.

“Are you kidding? I’M taking him, I’ve already called for the Taxi”.

My father gave me a hug and handed me the smooth peanut butter and strawberry jelly sandwich that he had made for me. He was still in his signature red, white and black. White cotton PJ’s, red silk bathrobe and black velvet slippers with bitsy gold crowns on the top. My mother was dressed like she was going to the Academy Awards. She had two looks…Soup Kitchen and Vogue magazine. It was tattered slippers or spotless high heels all the way. Bread line or Barneys. Sneakers and jeans were simply not in my mother’s vocabulary.

Today was of course, a red carpet day.

I put my brown paper bag into my white leather purse and mother and I hit the road.

Twenty right hand turns and fifteen cigarettes later, we pulled up at the school, which was roughly a mile and a half from our house.

My mother handed the driver a freshly minted Ben Franklin.

“Wait here”

“For how long?” he asked, in a heavy Pakistani accent.

“As long as it takes”, she said. “Could be half and hour, could be all day, I don’t know yet. When I get back, I’ll give you some more money”

He turned off the motor and got out his copy of the Bhagavad Gita.

We walked up to the entrance, and as we did I could see a window to a room full of other small beings just like me.

Weird!

Scary!!

Help!!!!!!!!!!

Before this point, I had spent no time whatsoever with other children.

Zero.

My playmates were mom, dad, the various maids and house servants, my teenage sister and a handful of her celebrity friends. Oh, and some politicians, internationally famous science fiction authors, academy award winning directors, legendary musicians, supermodels, the recording engineer that mixed the Beatles White Album. Plus a handful of doctors and pharmacists.

You know, the typical friends a little kid might have.

Oh yeah, I had lots of pals. Just no one under five feet tall, save for the time that I had met Billy Barty in the Twentieth Century Fox commissary.

We arrived at the school gate. Mom stubbed out her Kent King size, muttering under her breath.

“God Damn It All To Hell, Sons Of Bitches. Government Red Tape Crap!”

We walked through the hallway, my mothers heels clicking like morse code on the shiny linoleum.

There was a foreign odor, a dizzying combination of sweat, disinfectant and old books. I wanted to go home immediately, and felt a rising combination of thrilled fear and irritable bowels.

My mother knocked on the green door marked ‘first grade’, and a sweet looking older woman with blonde hair came to the door. She was wearing a powder blue pantsuit and had big gold earrings in the shape of butterflies.

“You must be Mrs. Freberg, we were expecting you. And we were expecting you too”, she said, looking at me with kind eyes. “I’m Mrs. Wheelis”. I shook her liver spotted hand, noticing her chalk-kissed fingers.

I wondered what she meant by “we”, and looked past her to see a gaggle of first graders sitting at small wooden desks. Some of them seemed to be drawing, but most were staring at the two space aliens in the hallway.

“Where is the bathroom”, I asked, as the beginnings of a long relationship with a spastic colon were having a field day in my lower tummy.

“Right behind you, dear”.

I turned to see the source of the disinfectant smell.

BOYS

“Hold my purse”, I said to my mom.

Mrs. Wheelis raised her painted on eyebrows.

I left my mother to chat with my new teacher and walked into the toilets.

As I creaked open the heavy black door, the Clorox curtain lifted and quickly gave way to odors I hadn’t smelled since my one trip to the lavatory at the LA train station.

The first thing that I noticed was that there wasn’t any doors on the stalls.

And I had to do a number two and a half.

Oh, joy of joys!

I took down my bell bottomed green cords and sat on the butt chilling black and white toilet.

Just as I did, a couple of horrible looking creatures came in and started throwing wet paper towels at each other.

“Eeeww! Somebodys making a stinky”, said the kid with the Chicklet front teeth.

“Yeah. Pee-Ewwww!”, said the other corpulent freckle, holding his nose.

Fear gripped me in a way that I hadn’t felt since booster shots.

It reached its death hand into me and gripped my guts like fresh playdough.

I felt like I was going to throw up my Eggo’s.

As the boys continued to hee and haw at me, my mother slowly entered the bathroom and stealthily crept up behind them like an alley cat in the shadows.

The tall boys guttural laughing gave way to a high pitched scream as my mother grabbed him by the back of the neck with her long red nails and swung him around like a wet noodle.

“Knock it off!” she said, in a voice that commanded instant terror.

They ran out of the bathroom faster than my heart was beating.

“Finish up and meet me outside”, she said.

I wiped with the ass destroying sandpaper toilet tissue and washed with the dry pink soap that could exfoliate an elephant. Then I splashed the icy tap water onto my volcanic face and went to take my wooden seat amongst my peers.

May 12, 2005

My friend Maija's mother Carol passed away three days ago. She had Alzheimers. Maija took care of her selflessly right to the end, because that is how Carol took care of her right from the beginning. I never got to know her when she had full use of her mind, but I did get to know her when she had full use of her heart.

She was beautiful.She had a laugh that could stop clocks.She glowed like a spinning firefly.She had eyes as kind as a gentle child, with great gleaming wisdom behind them.She was unforgettable.She was adored by anyone lucky enough to come into contact with her.

Dear Maija, I send you all the love and goodness and healing that I have contained in my heart. The heart of a boy who understands the chasm that comes when a mother flies away. Fill it with memories.

Watch the heartfelt and brilliant video, walk through the delightful picture galleries, check out the wonderous list of 10 things, print out Carol's POV and stick it on your wall, donate to the Alzheimers Foundation.